Parents, friends unite in search for teen

Parents and friends of a missing Winchester teenager are uniting with police in a grass-roots effort to find the girl. Luxshmi Kumar, 13, an eighth-grader at McCall Middle School, has been missing since about noon yesterday, police said. After a half-day at school, Kumar went to a Dunkin' Donuts in Arlington and called her mother, Maria. Fifteen minutes later, a dog walker in Arlington found Luxshmi's phone and called the mother, who met the dog walker. The McCall Middle School Parents' Association sent out an e-mail at 6:15 last night on the girl's disappearance. Co-president Robin Wolf said it is common for students from the middle school to go downtown after an early release. Police were searching for the teen where she was last seen, near Church and Cambridge streets in Winchester. "It's a very active investigation," said Lieutenant Robert Bongiorno, spokesman for the Arlington police. "Every one of our patrols is leafleting businesses in the community." Kumar is described as an Asian/Cape Verdean female, who is 5-foot-6 and weighs 115 pounds, with black shoulder-length hair, brown eyes, and dark-rimmed glasses.

Recent update: According to broadcast reports, Luxshmi Kumar was located safely and returned home

The Energy Facilities Siting Board gave tentative approval yesterday to the consolidation of nine state and local permits for the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm, a move that could hasten many of the last needed approvals for the project. If given final approval, it would be a blow to opponents of the wind farm who had hoped that construction of the 130-turbine Cape Wind project could be stopped by the denial of local permits. The Cape Cod Commission had previously denied a local permit to the wind farm developers. If the state's siting board agrees to the consolidation and approves the permit, it would overturn that decision.

Boston College will freeze some salaries and increase tuition for the next academic year by 3 percent, officials announced yesterday. The university's trustees approved the new tuition rate, $38,530, at their March 6 meeting. The cost of room and board also will rise slightly. In an e-mail to the BC community, the university's president, the Rev. William P. Leahy, said employees earning $75,000 or less will receive raises of 1.5 percent, while higher salaries will be frozen. BC will also save about $1.5 million by eliminating open administrative positions. BC also said it would boost its financial aid budget 7.3 percent to $74 million.

A trial has begun for one of the men stabbed in a fight at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst last year. John Bowes, 21, of Hancock, N.H., was in Eastern Hampshire District Court yesterday to face a charge of disorderly conduct and a civil rights violation. Prosecutors say Bowes was involved in a fight in Jason Vassell's dorm in February 2008. Prosecutors say Bowes used racial slurs against Vassell, who is black, before the UMass student allegedly stabbed Bowes and another man. Vassell's attorneys have filed a motion to dismiss the charges of aggravated assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. (AP)

A Framingham man has pleaded guilty to three dozen charges related to the kidnapping and repeated rape of a woman in front of her 2-year-old son. Evandro Doirado was sentenced to 25 to 30 years in prison and 10 years' probation yesterday after pleading guilty in Brockton Superior Court to kidnapping, rape, assault, and other charges. Prosecutors said the 31-year-old stabbed a man after an argument in December 2005, then stole his car and drove to a Framingham Wal-Mart. He then forced a 25-year-old woman and her child into her car at knifepoint and raped her repeatedly in a parking lot while her son was in the back seat. Authorities said Doirado then repeatedly raped the woman at a motel in Plymouth over two days while the child was nearby. (AP)